DEAF REPUBLIC is a libretto for the mind
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The insurgency has rarely sounded so ribald and so funny. With this kind of spirit threaded through the book, what person from any corner of the world would not want to read it?
In an age when the American poetry audience often demands immediate relevance to social justice in “this” moment, the foreign-born poet, unless she writes of the immigrant experience, finds herself in a predicament. Namely, how can I write my own poetic world in the US when that world lives on thousands of miles from the US border? Born in Odessa, Ukraine, Ilya Kaminsky faces this problem of our globalized world, and he does so as only he can. Isn’t that the individual approach we come to desire in poetry?
With his Soviet-Russian-Ukrainian literary inheritance in his back pocket, Kaminski writes an American audience into his native culture’s mythology. In this book and his previous collection, Dancing in Odessa, the reader encounters the presence of Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, Nikolai Gogol and perhaps above all others, Anton Chekhov (through his fabulous detail in storytelling). For this reason, the collection, in the form of a book-length narrative, envelopes the American reader in a historical world that sprang up in old Russia and has since developed through eras of Soviet and oligarchic Russia and the supposedly “independent-era” of the Ukraine.
Much like his first full book, his new collection has been strung together with a narrative and this one circles around a town square in a mythopoetic “deaf republic,” which takes on a double-meaning for the hearing-impaired poet. This town is populated by characters whose names would not sound out-of-place in a Chekhov story and soldiers who might as well be ordered by Stalin. Within the first pages, Kaminsky borrows Shakespeare’s crusty yet trusty metaphor of “the stage” and sets his country there. He then trots out a quintessential metaphor for dictatorships, marionettes (which date back to at least 5th-4th century BCE of Ancient Greece). This allows him to frame Act I of the book around the “I” narrator, puppeteer Alfonso Barabinski, who speaks amidst the “we” chorus, to borrow a term from the Ancient Greeks again. The chorus represents, in this case, the townspeople of Vesenka, where the square lies. Leaning so heavily on these tropes of ancient Greek and Elizabethan tragedy, Kaminsky sets an unmistakable tone and the gloom looms. The fact that Kaminski makes it difficult to parse who is a marionette and who is a human being, who is deaf and who is not, only raises tension.
Kaminski’s vivid images and ticklish lines give the book a distinct charm despite the dour expectations Kaminski’s narrator sets for his characters within the first few pages. In lines that move with the quicksilver pace of prose and the more subtle music of sentences, Kaminsky orchestrates a libretto for the mind. This raises the collection to a grandeur that an American audience may mistrust for its sweeping aesthetic ideas but secretly admire for its ability to achieve the levels of complexity ruggedly-self driven American poets often strive for, but too often they slide into a solipsism.
Kaminski side-steps this pit fall by stepping out of his own skin enough to trace his concerns around a larger cast much like a playwright might cast her characters. The first act presents the town coping with the murder of young boy in the first few pages. Soldiers shoot dead Petya, a young boy who presents like the archetypal little brat, who had the gall to spit a loogie onto the Sergeant. Brutality comes crashing down on the young boy and continues rolling right over the republic.
Kaminski’s lines speeds up at liquid silver pace. His prose-like rhythms and pacing make for a very readable book, a sort of short story collection at whip-crack-speed. “Deafness, an Insurgency, Begins” depicts the rebellion that ensued: “Our country woke up next morning and refused to hear soldiers./ In the name of Petya, we refuse.” The poem goes on to list the events of the day which lead to arrests, and the people’s resolve strengthens. By the end of the poem, the narrator Alfonso Barabinski notes, “In the ears of the town, snow falls.” In doing so, he describes how the omnipresence of deafness on the movement towards liberation but it also speaks to the lyricism in Kaminski’s work because of his own deafness.
In his first book, the speaker of the poem states: “My secret: at the age of four I became deaf. When I lost my hearing, I began to see voices.” This is what psychologists call synesthesia — the tendency to conflate senses with one other. This occurs when “stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway (for example, hearing) leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway (such as vision),” according to Psychology Today. This blurring of sensory experience makes for a shimmery lyricism in his work — like the flickering of the mind’s film projector; metaphorical play envelopes the reader in its light. Kaminski allows us to access imagery his way: hearing becomes seeing. As a result, we get lines that bewilder while puzzling out strangely compelling contradictions. In “While the Child Sleeps, Sonya Undresses” we get lines like this:
A man should smell better than his country —
such is the silence
Of a woman who speaks against silence, knowingsilence moves us to speak.
By inviting us to see what he sees in place of what he hears, Kaminski opens us up to a new of poetic pallet. This alone will make poet nerds a whole new range of joys, while it’s general readability will appeal well to a general audience.
In the second half of the book, Act II, the townspeople narrate the revenge plot against the dictatorship. Mama Galya, a mysterious 53-year-old woman who rides her green bicycle through town and gets more action in the sack than anybody else, leads the insurgency, along with her girls. A gutsy broad, she is quite the treat to observe. In “When Mama Gayla First Protested,” “She sucks at a cigarette butt and yells/ to a soldier,/ Go home! You haven’t kissed your wife since Noah was a sailor!” Then later, “Momma Galya Armolinskaya,/ by the avenue’s wet walls, yells:/ Deafness isn’t an illness! It’s a sexual position!” The insurgency has rarely sounded so ribald and so funny. With this kind of spirit threaded through the book, what person from any corner of the world would not want to read it?
When the book winds down, he leaves us all — yes, us Americans, too — with a sweet note. Why wouldn’t he want to end on a sweet note, when sweetness is something even the deaf can appreciate when violence flashes across the screens before us on a daily basis? And how would we ever know sweetness without bitterness?
